While we have a fairly short time span from Hurricane Floyd until present, I believe that high rainfall events are coming more often and they are negatively impacting our trout streams. Many of these events are somewhat isolated. Interesting data Bob, thanks for posting.

Posted on: 2014/4/7 11:43

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The object of a resource is to use and reuse a resource, not to use it up, have we learned nothing in over 125 years of stocking?

JasonS wrote:Article is meaningless nonsense. I'll wait to see if anyone else can point out why.

I'm not sure that it is meaningless nonsense, but rather just a reporting of a small data set, of which my age is longer than the data set time period is. And its dangerous to draw long term trends from a decade's worth of data. Please enlighten us who are in the dark, (because of power outages, because of more frequent and violent storms, because of global climate change).

Nah you pretty much nailed it. It's a ridiculously small sample size. And they're not just reporting on a small data set, they are drawing conclusions from it. It'd be like questioning the fundamentals of probability because you flipped a coin twice and both times it came up heads.

interesting to recall some of those storms. I got my house in the month with the day of heaviest rain for 15 years, in an area with springs. nice :)

the article gives vivid examples of heavy rains in our region last 15 years. it also says that days with 2+ inches of rain are more common in DE since 99 without showing any older data as the "before" picture. I noticed that on first read and titled my OP "on the rise?"

it's a newspaper folks, and reporters aren't specialists and cant work for too long on each article. it would be careless to select and present the post 99 data if the pre 99 data look no different. I tend to doubt they did that, but it's a newspaper folks.. ...

Article is meaningless nonsense. I'll wait to see if anyone else can point out why.

They precede the statement by saying that temperature, snowfall, etc. has wild ups and downs. To anyone trained in statistics, that immediately tells you that there's a lot of noise, and due to the amount of noise, the sample size is too small to come up with reasonable control limits, i.e. any sort of an estimate of a "typical range".

They follow it up with extreme rainfall events. The same logic applies. Hence showing that it is too small of a sample to properly understand "typical" behavior.

Most of climate science is hampered by the same innate weakness. It's a noisy system, and signals are small, so the signal/noise ratio is just horrendous. To be statistically valid, that means you have to compare separate 20 or 30+ year time frames. In doing so, you can indeed identify statistically valid trends. But such trends are the cumulative result of sometimes a dozen or more KNOWN causes and an untold number of unknown ones, all acting in different directions but still dependent on one another.

To get anything real, you have to do a lot of averaging out, and then it loses significance to any one time or place. For instance, if you want to get meaningful data on temperature, one place is way too noisy unless you wanna use 100+ year time frames. So you average over the globe to reduce noise, allowing meaningful data in a mere decade. You then find that 53 places are warming and 47 are cooling. That is statistically real, not imagined, and carries scientific meaning. But what it means for your backyard is totally lost.

A quick look at weather data from Allentown, which is the nearest NOAA station to me shows some similarities to the events in Del. but they aren't identical. As for the short data set, yes that was my first thought, but we can look at tree rings and other stored data and get a clear picture of what our climate has been over thousands of years.Whay I can say is that I've been on this planet for 60+years, and these major events didn't come as frequently when I was a kid as they do now. Climatologically speaking 60 years is a very short time, even though many of you weren't born yet it is changing.Just look at the number of hurricanes we've had over the last ten years, and you can see the difference, we use to get maybe a hurricane hit PA. once every couple of years, and a big one maybe every 10 to 15 years. Since 2005 we had a much higher frequency of hurricanes hit PA. and they've been major events when they've happened. Is it because of global climate change, maybe, maybe not. But something is going on.Of course there will always be deniers.

Posted on: 2014/4/7 16:15

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The object of a resource is to use and reuse a resource, not to use it up, have we learned nothing in over 125 years of stocking?

Doesn't matter whether it was random or whatever, I fish in eastern sullivan county. The area got 10 inches of rain over a several day stretch in 2011 (page 10 below) when streams already had water from a 3+ inch rain a dozen days earlier (page 9 below).

Info on the rainfall totals in E Sullivan makes me less interested in older fishing books, etc, because that much rain could have changed stream structures up there.

k-bob wrote:Doesn't matter whether it was random or whatever, I fish in eastern sullivan county. The area got 10 inches of rain over a several day stretch in 2011 (page 10 below) when streams already had water from a 3+ inch rain a dozen days earlier (page 9 below).

Info on the rainfall totals in E Sullivan makes me less interested in older fishing books, etc, because that much rain could have changed stream structures up there.

However, when I look at data like this, I think of how it changes water chemistry further down the stream because mountain waters move faster and wash things down to the wider, deeper (interpreted slower) water where an entire sediment layer and/or chemical balance can influence a lot of things.

Sure, a creek might change course, get big rocks in an old hole and carve out new holes, but the river it feeds is going to collect all that junk and runoff. I'd argue it's the slower-moving mouths that bear the brunt of this weather pattern.

Posted on: 2014/4/7 17:35

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